Symantec Responds To Google Distrusting Its Certificates

Symantec Responds To Google Distrusting Its Certificates

Google announced in March that its Chrome browser would gradually stop trusting certificates issued by Symantec because the company improperly issued 30,000 certificates over the last few years. Symantec responded today with a blog post saying it’s met with Google to discuss the issue several times and that its customers have said the change would “cause significant business disruption and additional expense.”Certificates are used to verify a website operator’s identity. If everything’s on the up-and-up, browsers can then form secure connections with the site, which allows you to send or access sensitive data without having to worry about it being compromised. This means it’s important for certificates to be properly issued; otherwise an ostensibly secure connection might actually put your private information at risk.Google discovered in 2015 that Symantec issued certificates for its Google.com domain even though it never requested those certificates. This led both companies to investigate Symantec’s certificate issuing process, and eventually they discovered several mis-issued certificates. Google said roughly 30,000 certificates were improperly issued; Symantec said in a message to its customers that only 127 certificates weren’t properly issued.